Since the dawn of the human race conversations have successfully passed information from one person to another (even though cavemen spoke in grunts I’m sure they still managed to decide on which part of the carcass they’d prefer to eat for dinner!). This is news.

Fast forward a couple of thousand years to the 20th Century – language has developed and the industrial revolution has kicked in. The modern world has well and truly got going.

It was an important century, and marked the start of a progressive global shift away from words and the printed press for the transmission of information and knowledge.

Whilst face-to-face conversations still dominated, people were becoming increasingly able to communicate with people further away than their garden fence.

It’s not just language that was revolutionised. Images now play a central role in news broadcasting and citizen journalism.

Whilst it’s not the most beautiful of timelines, here’s a pretty comprehensive history of communications, starting with Kodak Brownies invention in 1900 that made photography cheaper and simpler. What a man.